Call me a Chinese auntie. Better yet, celebrate auntie power with me

A couple of years ago, I made a call for those from the Chinese and wider East Asian diaspora in London who identified as aunties to come together and literally spill some tea.

“You’ve seen her, you’ve been her, you are her or you’re going to be her,” I wrote in a social media post for the event I was organising. The middle-aged Asian woman had languished for far too long in pop culture as a comedic cliché, I went on, but she was coming into her own now, as “Michelle Yeoh in her shapeless knitted vest and nurse shoes badassing in Everything Everywhere All At Once; Sandra Oh in her tiger-mum – oops, no – red-panda guise commandeering stadium space, the ladies who lunch in Crazy Rich Asians who power gossip”.

I have the lived experience of an auntie, of course, as gugu (paternal aunt) to four studious preteens. But in making that call, I was also channelling some academic theory and minoritised-person activism – particularly the work of the Critical Aunty Studies initiative pioneered by researcher Kareem Khubchandani, which speaks to the efficacy of neighbourhood gossip networks, unorthodox lifehacks and such.

And that’s where it got a wee bit complicated. Technically, the term “auntie” – used to designate a random woman of indeterminate age – is postcolonial. Actual titles used in the Chinese world (like sangu and liupo, meaning the father’s third sister and the mother’s sixth aunt respectively) specify the degree of kinship and reflect the patriarchal structure of Chinese families.

Then there is the obasan from Japan, or the ajumma from Korea, whom I could also see myself as, part of a wider community of people with “yellow skin”. How did the Chinese auntie fit into all this?

“Never mind, we can just mix and match,” said a Malaysian Chinese friend, a new recruit to the aunties’ movement. “In the West, they think we are all the same anyway.”